Powered landscape maintenance tools are well known in the art. These range from rotary tillers to string trimmers and the like. Among powered landscape tools, in recent years several manufacturers have realized that several tools can be interchangebly driven from a single motive source, thereby eliminating the need for several engines, each of which could only be used serially by a single user, to drive a multiplicity of toolheads necessary for thorough landscape maintenance. Well known among these are the tools made by BCS S.p.A, an Italian company, and distributed in the United States by BCS America LLC. These implements can be seen on the BCS America website at www.bcs-america.com. With these implements a single powerhead can drive, for example, a snowblower, a sweeper, a rotary or scissor type mower, a shredder or tiller. Another device is distributed by Country Home Products under the name of the DR® Field and Brush Mower. While this is primarily a brush mower, there are available attachments for snowblowing and snowplowing as well as a rotary mower attachment. Similar power take off attachments are available in the product lines of several manufacturers such as Troy-bilt® tillers, and GrassMasters Inc. WorkStation™ line of convertible power washers/generators.
Among patented devices, U.S. Pat. No. 4,597,203 to Middleton describes a convertible snowblower; U.S. Pat. No. 4,104,812 to Stribiak discloses an adaptor for attaching a snowblower to a conventional lawnmower; U.S. Pat. No. 4,833,800 to Ting discloses a combination snowblower and lawn mower; U.S. Pat. No. 4,897,942 to Klas discloses a snowblower with a variable ratio pulley; U.S. Pat. No. 5,090,142 to Peters discloses another means for attaching a snowblower to a lawnmower; U.S. Pat. No. 5,013,282 to Keller discloses a portable tree pruner with an extensible shaft assembly; U.S. Pat. No. 6,006,434 to Templeton et al. discloses a quick release connector for attaching differing toolheads to a power unit; U.S. Pat. No. 4,446,679 to Thomas discloses a multipurpose wheeled implement configured to secure a lawnmower, rotary tiller or snowblower; U.S. Pat. No. 4,308,676 to Doane discloses a lawn mower with a power take-off to drive differing implements and U.S. Pat. No. 4,170,099 to Owens and U.S. Pat. No. 4,896,488 to Duncan disclose rotary lawnmowers with string trimmers affixed thereto.
These various devices suffer from either the inability to attach a wide variety of alternate devices to the power head or, conversely, a difficulty in easily affixing and detaching the various toolheads from the supplied powerhead.